Feature

The Bible Tells Me So

Everything You Need to Know About Morality & the Bible by David Mills

A colleague once attacked me in a meeting, then cut off my response
by turning to our supervisor, thrusting his fist into the air, and declaring, “ I’m not interested in the past, I care about the future!” In
one move he
managed to insult me, prevent me from responding, and portray himself as (in
contrast to me) both forgiving and idealistic. This sort of linguistic terrorism
leaves
most of us stumbling over our own feet, while our opponents trot smugly over
the
finish line.

One feels much the same when engaged in arguments, especially arguments
over sexual morality, with our liberals. Liberal or skeptical Christians have
been
inventing and field-testing ways of getting around biblical teaching for a
very long
time, and they have gotten very good at it. They are now so sophisticated that
average Christians, who are called to pursuits other than biblical scholarship
and
theology, can give no convincing answers to their exotic proposals for revising
the
Christian faith.

Two Observations

I will take sexual morality as an example, not because (as our liberals keep
hinting) orthodox Christians are afraid of sex, but because it is where the
debate on
biblical teaching has been most clearly joined.

Unlike the modernists of old, our liberals are usually quite happy to let
us believe in the Virgin Birth or the bodily Resurrection, or for that matter
praying in
tongues, presumably on the assumption that it keeps us occupied and out of
their
way. They only object when we dare to argue for moral limitations and ideals
they
have long ago abandoned. They will tolerate the most extravagant supernaturalism,
as long as it is not assumed that the supernatural makes binding statements
about human sexual behavior.

Orthodox Christians (with the embarrassing exception of groups trying to
raise money) actually talk far less about sex than the representatives of liberalism.
Some Christians on both sides are rather unhealthily concerned with sex. They
have sex on the brain, which, as someone remarked, is an odd place to have
it.

But if we tend to talk a lot about sex, we do so because it is the aspect
of the
inherited Christian moral teaching most directly challenged by our culture
and,
sadly, by powerful and vocal movements in our own churches. The use of sex
is the
question of the hour. To accuse orthodox Christians of being obsessed with
sex is
somewhat like accusing firemen in a city victimized by arsonists of thinking
too
often about fires.

The Authority of Scripture

The question of what the Bible really says is a problem because, when
members of
the major churches discuss moral questions, surprisingly enough they are all
still
talking about the Bible. Even the most radical Christian still appeals to the
authority of Scripture, or to be more precise, to Scripture as an authority.
Whatever
limitations he wants to put upon that authority, or other authorities he wants
to
add, he still looks for what support he can find in the Bible.

In Living in Sin?, for example, Bishop John Spong attempted to ground
his
moral innovations in the Bible. He argued that though we should ignore the
Bible’s
prohibition of sex outside marriage because “science” tells us
that some people are
not made for marriage and current social practices tell us that many want sex
without
marriage, we should endorse its belief in monogamy.

You may remember Spong’s shock several years ago when one of his priests—
whom the bishop had ordained with great publicity because of his open practice
of
homosexuality—denigrated monogamy as “unnatural” and said
Mother Teresa
would be a more effective minister if she were sexually experienced. The bishop
removed his license to function as a priest, though, as several commentators
noted
at the time, the priest was only being faithful to the bishop’s own assumptions
about the superiority of cultural practices to biblical injunctions. But despite
his
rather confused approach to the Bible, Bishop Spong still tries to get its
support
whenever he can.

In a book called Dirt, Greed, and Sex, a professor at an Episcopal
seminary
based his entire moral teaching on the one verse that Jesus “made all
things clean.”
(He reads that verse, contrary to established Anglican principle, to contradict
other
verses, not least the first chapters of Genesis.) What we call biblical morality,
he
argued, is unfaithful to the Bible. He contended that the Old Testament prohibition
of homosexual acts expressed a “purity ethic” no longer needed
now that all
things have been made clean. This led him to the extraordinary conclusion—one
among several—that “among the young and those in temporary isolation,
bestiality
should not occasion too much concern.” It might not occasion him too
much
concern, but one does wonder what the sheep are thinking, grazing nervously
whenever an Episcopalian walks by.

I am told this sort of thing happens in other churches as well—except
for
Orthodoxy, which is spared (for the moment) the subtleties of liberalism—and
that, if anything, the Bible is newly fashionable in liberal circles. We all
still take
Scripture as an authority of some sort, but it hasn’t gotten us very
far.

A Few Examples

A few examples from the current movement to legitimize homosexual relationships
show the problems we face in discerning the true biblical teaching. The
movement’s answers and questions make our own amateur responses look
terribly
inadequate.

For example, if we quote the verses condemning homosexual acts,
we are told that scholars have shown that these verses did not condemn what
we now
call “ loving, committed, monogamous relationships” but promiscuous, predatory
sex.
Or we are told that scholars have shown that it applies not to those of homosexual
orientation but only to heterosexual men and women committing
homosexual acts
contrary to their orientations. If we argue that the Church has never approved
homosexual relationships, we are told that scholars have found that the Church
blessed homosexual marriages long before it blessed heterosexual ones.

We are told that the Bible is hopelessly biased, or our reading is hopelessly
biased, by “heterosexism” or “homophobia.” We are promised
that if we could
read it without these prejudices we would find that “loving, committed,
and
monogamous relationships” are in fact good and holy. We are asked to
find the
Bible’s true meaning—and condemned for not having done so already—which
our liberals see and we don’t. Thus, an Episcopal organization dedicated
to
legitimizing homosexuality can run an ad claiming to represent the true “traditionalists”
and to rescue the Bible and Tradition from people like us.

I don’t know, off the top of my head, how to refute these claims, much
less any
new ones they think up—and I have the advantage over most Christians
of being
professionally involved in church issues and of having theological colleagues
to ask
and a theological library to use. So what are we to do? How shall we hear God’s
word about morality in the Bible?

How Shall We Hear?

In short, we ought to do three simple but not easy things. These won’t
make
us able to successfully counter new interpretations of Scripture, but they
will give
us a confidence in biblical teaching that will sustain us even when we can’t
answer
an objection. They will give us a serene certainty that may well prove more
effective
in changing others’ hearts and lives than any amount of knowledge or
skill in
debate. The three things are: first, read and study the Bible; second, interpret
it
from within the Church and her Tradition; and third, allow yourselves to be
formed
more and more into the image of Christ by his Word in his Body, the Church.

These three actions depend, of course, on the assumption that the Bible is
true. Not just that it tells the truth on this or that matter, if we are discerning
enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, but that everything in it tells
the
truth about God and man. We should only put ourselves in the right place to
hear
God speaking if he is actually speaking. If he isn’t, the liberals are
right, because, to
revise Dostoevsky’s remark, if God is not speaking in the Bible, then
everything is
permitted.

Read & Study the Bible

First, read and study the Bible. This means daily, for a significant amount
of time,
using accurate translations and trustworthy commentaries. It means mastering
the
ancient art of meditating upon the Scriptures, reading and thinking about them
in
such a way that you encounter the Lord in them. It means listening to God where
he’s widely known to be speaking. You are reading this because you had
good
reason to think you’d read something you wanted or needed to hear. How
much
more eagerly should you go where the Lord God himself is speaking?

To put it bluntly, you must read the Bible because the Bible is the source
of
biblical moral teaching. It is just no good taking a stand for biblical moral
teaching
when what you mean are the ideas everyone I know believes in, and that I remember
from my parents and my old Sunday school teacher and a few sermons from
the pastor when I was a kid. That is idolatry: putting in the place of God’s
Word
the false assumptions, the exaggerated notions, the blind spots, the self-serving
ideas of one’s time or culture or class or upbringing.

Above all things, you must read the Bible. When the serpent slithered up to
Eve in the Garden, he asked her, “Hath God said, ‘Ye shall not
eat of every tree of
the Garden?’” The very first temptation in the Bible was the temptation
to forget,
not to deny, the Word of God. The serpent surely had exceptional insight into
human nature. If he thought that the temptation to forget was the
most likely to
work, it undoubtedly is. And we are, if anything, far more susceptible to this
temptation
than Eve.

We protect ourselves from this temptation by following the example of Eve’s
counterpart, the Blessed Virgin. As St. Luke’s Gospel says, “And
all they that heard
it [the shepherds’ testimony to the Christ Child] wondered at those things
which
were told them by the shepherds. But Mary pondered them in her heart” (Luke
2:18–19). Had the serpent asked her, “Hath God said?” she
would have been able
to say, “Yes. Now get thee behind me.” All I am asking you to do,
in this first part,
is to imitate Mary and to ponder the Word in your heart.

However, reading the Bible is not quite as easy as it sounds. It is not just
a
matter of disciplining our time, but of disciplining our souls. If we are to
hear the
message of the Bible with any accuracy, we must come to it with more humility
than most of us like or have. We must remember that we read the Bible as utter
moral failures, men and women whose goodness is “as filthy rags” (Isaiah
64:6)—
which is, among other reasons, why it should be read in the context of a prayer
that
includes confession.

The Bible convicts you and me as thoroughly as anyone else on earth. As
G. K. Chesterton said, the fall is the only empirically provable Christian
doctrine.
Even St. Paul, who was much, much farther advanced in sanctity than most of
us,
called himself the worst of sinners. With typical and currently unfashionable
realism,
the confession in all the historic liturgies is to be said by all people without
exception—by Mother Teresa as well as by Joseph Stalin. In the words
of the traditional
Anglican confession, everyone must daily

“acknowledge and bewail our
manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously
have
committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking
most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.”

When we’re feeling good about our apparent superiority to some others
we
could name, we must remember that each of us faces some temptations and not
others. We are tempted according to our situation in life. We are all oriented
toward
particular sins. Whatever its source—defective genes, a dysfunctional
family,
poor potty training—an “orientation” is merely a recurring
temptation, not, as the
homosexual lobby claims, an excuse to act in a certain way or evidence of God’s
intention for one’s life.

The story of the rich young ruler and the parable of the camel and the needle’s
eye show that wealth brings with it peculiar temptations (or orientations)
quite
difficult to resist. To our Lord’s sorrow, the rich young ruler did not
resist these
temptations. But in response to him Jesus did not—as some church leaders
would
now have us do—relax the entrance requirements to bring him into the
group.
Our Lord did not think it compassionate or inclusive to tell him that God approved
whatever he wanted to do. (Misuse of wealth, by the way, sometimes seems
the only sin identified in the New Testament many church leaders still recognize.)
We have all sinned and, from God’s point of view, are not a pretty sight.
To
think ourselves better than others because we haven’t committed their
particular
sin is like a town boasting that it has the prettiest toxic waste dump.

A Clear & Coherent Pattern

When you read and study the Bible with a redeemed heart you will find
that its
teachings are, by and large, clear. And you will find also that its teachings
are, by
and large, coherent and consistent. If God is its author, this is to be expected.
The
Bible is the owner’s manual for our life, written by someone who was—unlike
most
VCR companies—quite careful to write it so that we could understand it.
A
divinely inspired owner’s manual will be clear and coherent and consistent
to those
who read it carefully with humility and trust. We should take our Lord at his
word
when he said, “Seek and ye shall find. Ask and it shall be given to you.”

Of course, some people will refuse to read the Bible and try to figure things
out themselves, or only read the easier parts, or skim it for the high points,
or
refuse to believe what they read, or take someone else’s word for it,
or forget it the
next day. Having given them free will, the Author can’t do much about
them.
Once you buy a car, the dealer can’t help it if you use leaded gasoline
and ruin the
engine.

The Laity and the Bible

Unfortunately, the laity often think that the Bible is just too hard to understand.
The laity see scholars fighting over its interpretation and assume, quite
reasonably, that the rest of us shouldn’t even bother. Or they are assured
by the
clergy that the Bible is a difficult and deceptive document that really doesn’t
say
what it seems to say, and that only those with seminary training should try
to
penetrate its mysteries.

Fortunately, however, though the Bible is sometimes difficult to understand,
it isn’t too difficult to understand. All the most important
truths the Bible teaches
really are clear. The Bible is an owner’s manual written by someone who
wants you
to understand it. If you read it with humility, no matter how little you know,
you’re
like a builder who can put up the walls and put in the furnace but cannot do
the
finish work, cannot put in the kitchen cabinets and the bookshelves, and so
on.

Even if your house isn’t pretty, and you have to pile the cans and books
on the floor
and order take-out food, it will keep you warm and dry. It will do what a house
is
supposed to do, even if it will never be featured in Architectural Digest. If
you read
the Bible with a humble and contrite heart, you will know what you are supposed
to know, even if you will never qualify as a scholar and will never be able
to defeat
the clever arguments of its enemies.

The Bible’s moral teaching, for example, is clear. The Bible both forbids
us to
do certain things and commands us to do others, and when there are two holy
states of life, such as being married or single, it gives us instructions for
both.
The Bible is quite clear that sex outside marriage and homosexual behavior
are not allowed and that marriage is good, as indicated by our Lord’s
contribution
to the festivities of the marriage at Cana and his declaration that God himself
has
joined together husband and wife (Matthew 19:6).1 We know that celibacy is
also
a good thing, by our Lord’s own example. And Jesus and St. Paul imply
it is a better
state than marriage.

The Pattern in the Biblical Cloth

If you know your Bible, you will begin to see the pattern in the biblical cloth.
You will know that any particular error doesn’t fit the pattern, is a
blotch on the
tartan or a tear in the tweed. You will know it doesn’t feel biblical,
even if you can’t
refute it. If you read a story set in a place where you’ve lived, you
know with some
certainty whether the author really knew the place. He might have made some
error
in description. Or he might have gotten all the details right and still not
described
the place itself, so that though you can’t point to any particular error,
you can still
say “No, that isn’t my home.” So with the Bible. If you live
in it, wander down its
streets, play in its parks, you will easily detect the frauds and imitations.

If you want to know a true Rembrandt from a forgery, you study true
Rembrandts.2 You learn to distinguish an authentic painting from a very good
fraud by studying with excruciating care paintings known to be authentic. (Their
authenticity, by the way, you have to take on reliable authority, as most of
us must
take the authenticity of the biblical books on reliable authority, in which
we’re
as
justified as the student who accepts the consensus of Rembrandt scholars.)

You use a magnifying glass to study Rembrandt’s brushwork, and you stare
at
his paintings for hours to learn how he composed his pictures and how he used
color, and so on. You’ll never know Rembrandt if you don’t spend
a lot of time
with Rembrandt. But if you won’t learn his methods with scientific reliability,
you
won’t ever be able to say with mathematical certainty that this or that
painting is
authentic. But you will have trained your eye to recognize Rembrandt. If you
think
this an unreliable way of judging things, just remember that prudent people
spend
millions and millions of dollars on paintings on just such recommendations.

Knowing the biblical pattern helps us discern its teaching on controverted
questions. If someone says that self-fulfillment is more important than continued
faithfulness to his wife or that St. Paul condemns only promiscuous homosexuality
but would have approved “loving, committed, monogamous relationships,” and
he produces a wealth of scholarship to support his claim, you will be able
to say
that it simply doesn’t fit the pattern. If you know the pattern, you
will be able to
say that every time the Bible mentions homosexuality, it condemns it, and that
nowhere does the Bible commend or approve such acts, as you would expect if
they were sometimes permissible, because otherwise God had failed to tell us
something
important. You could add that the biblical ideal is either chastity or faithfulness
between husband and wife, and that this is understood to be the source of joy
and happiness and contentment, and that unfaithfulness is understood to be
a
source of sorrow and pain and tragedy.

Further, if you know the pattern, you will know how intimately God has tied
together the body and behavior. It will be clear that the fact that men and
women
have complimentary sexual organs, and that the combination of those organs
produces fruit, means that they are meant for each other and that to use them
in
any other way is a perversion. You will know that becoming “one flesh” through
sexual intercourse is not a metaphor for “growing closer” but a
natural and
supernatural reality.

And you will sense the many more profound and subtle meanings, even if
only the wisest men and women are able to make them explicit. Since the deepest
truths are the truths most easily denied by the liberals’ simple and
rational (or
rationalist) criticisms, it is thus important that you actually sense them
yourself
rather than take them on someone else’s authority, if you don’t
want to wander into
deeper darkness. It is easy to believe things seen in the distance are actually
mirages
or illusions when they are only far away, and can be reached if you keep walking.

The Biblical Pattern

Thus, there are sometimes no conclusive answers to questions about
biblical
teaching—answers, that is, that will win arguments and convince skeptics—but
there is a conclusive pattern, which convinces despite our inevitable
ignorance on
one point or another. This pattern of answers will convince and sustain you
despite
your ignorance, much as a net with a hole or two will still catch enough fish
to feed
your family.

The better you know the Bible, the better you will know the pattern, and the
better you will understand even the difficult parts that scholars dispute among
themselves. Reading the Bible daily is like living with a family. After a while,
you
know what they are going to say almost before they say it, and you know what
they
mean even when they don’t make any sense. Actions you couldn’t
understand when
you were first married make perfect sense when you’ve been married five
or ten or
twenty years.

Read the Bible Within the Church

So, read and study the Bible. That is absolutely necessary, and you won’t
get
anywhere if you don’t start there. But still more is required. The second
thing to
do is to read the Bible within the Church and her teaching Tradition, for otherwise
you will go wrong. This may seem to contradict my claim that the Bible is
astonishingly clear and coherent and consistent, but it really doesn’t
because the
man or woman committed to hearing the Word of the Lord will want to hear it
within his Body. If you don’t want to hear it within his Body, it’s
likely that you
really don’t want to hear it. You aren’t really a friend of the Lord
if you don’t care
what his other friends think.

Only within Christ’s Body, the Church, will you find guidance and direction,
the answers to obscurities, and the encouragement to accept the (to worldly
minds)
unlikely and (to sinful hearts) unappealing. There, in the line of believers
going
back to the apostles, you will find the insights and discoveries, the accumulated
wisdom, the experiments and theories successful and unsuccessful, to balance
and correct your own weaknesses and most grievous faults.

We are in grave danger without the Church. Because we sin we will misread
the Bible in our favor. It is all too easy to use the pages of the Bible to
paper over all
the mirrors in our house so that we never see ourselves as we really are.

Look again at Eve. She erred only when she strayed from her “interpretive
community,” to use the current jargon: from those (in her case, Adam)
who could
have identified the serpent’s lines as lies, and whose love would have
encouraged
her to resist. When she set out on her own to interpret God’s words,
she inevitably
fell into sin. (Adam’s sin was in failing to be a faithful and authoritative
interpretive
community, which has obvious implications for our clergy.)

It has to be noted that to read the Bible within the Church and her Tradition
is necessary to keep from reading the Bible within the increasing rejection
of
Tradition now practiced by many in the churches, including their elders. Error
and
heresy are as likely to come from the elders and official bodies of the churches
as
from anywhere else. We need the Church, the Church of the ages, to protect
us
from the wrongful teachings of some in our churches.

The Church’s guidance is not just intellectual but spiritual and moral.
The
fellowship and counsel of other believers sustain us, while we are restrained
by
their censure and scrutiny. Holy Communion nourishes us and gives us strength
to act rightly, and confession forces us to admit that we act wrongly. Most
of us
would be much worse without “the goodly fellowship of all faithful people,” as
the
traditional Anglican liturgy puts it. It is often much easier to offend the
Lord than
the people in your parish.

Two Examples

Christian moral teaching goes wrong—very quickly becomes narrow and
twisted and legalistic—when it is separated from the Church and her Tradition.
Years ago, in some circles “temperance” had come to mean “not
drinking,” which
is not even a Christian idea. It had lost its meaning of doing all things as
they
ought to be done, in moderation. The Church would have protected these people
from such a narrow and unbiblical interpretation, and at the same time taught
them the profound and life-giving wisdom carried in the idea of temperance.
Without the traditional understanding of the Church, they inflicted upon the
country a prohibition that, among other things, led to the growth of organized
crime and taught many people disrespect for the law.

Without the Church, one person’s or one group’s or one society’s
or one age’s
eccentricities and tastes and hates and loves become identified with Christian
morality,
which leads at best to absurdity, but usually to tragedy and squalor. Many
sincerely religious Victorians justified the oppression of the poor by quoting “the
poor ye shall have with you always.” But those Anglican priests nurtured
by the
Oxford Movement’s rediscovery of Christian tradition and the authority
of the
historic Church gave up promising careers to serve the poor in the slum parishes
and worked to change the hearts and minds and laws of their countrymen to abolish
the horrors of the Victorian slums and factories.3

The Image of Christ

So, read and study the Bible, and read and study it within the Church
and her
Tradition. But there is yet one more thing to do, and it is the most difficult.
You
must give yourselves to be formed more and more into the image of Christ by
his
Word in his Body the Church, of which he is the Source and Author.
In the beautiful words of the Anglican prayer of consecration, we ought to
live
so that we may “be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and
be made
one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.” You will
only begin
to truly understand the moral teaching of the Bible when you become like its
Author, when he dwells in you, and you in him. The Risen Christ spent the time
before his Ascension opening the Scriptures to his disciples. The Lord dwells
with
us to open his Word to us.

We tend to think that we can go to the Bible and find out what it says, and
then obey it or not as we wish. This belief is the product of an entirely modern
way
of thinking often called “positivism.” Positivism wrongly applies
the objective
methods of scientific observation—which aren’t, as philosophers
have been saying
for some time, quite so objective after all—to moral and spiritual things.
It assumes
that anyone can discern God’s law as easily as he can observe the law
of
gravity.

Modern liberalism or skepticism, born from the great advance in the scientific
study of the Bible in the last century, began with this assumption. When, after
decades of confidently announcing “the assured results of biblical criticism” (which
tended to contradict the previously assured results), liberal scholars found
that the
Bible could not be quite so reliably understood with the methods of science,
they
generally abandoned not the assumption but any belief that the Bible had a
coherent
message. Such is the reason, I think, for the current vogue of movements like
“ deconstructionism,” “postmodernism,” and “reader
response criticism,” which deny
that “the text” can carry truth from the author (who is definitely
not the Author)
to the reader.

Positivism fails in spiritual things because it leaves out the human heart.
The
heart is the instrument through which we see and measure spiritual things.
If your
heart is corrupt and unredeemed, you won’t be able to see with it—or
rather more
worrisomely, its subtle flaws will make you see wrongly while thinking you
see
rightly.

The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” seems absolutely clear. It
means “Don’t kill.” Even those who believe it allows
for war or capital punishment know
that it forbids the killing of innocent people. But today certain ideologues
in the
mainline churches believe it doesn’t apply to unborn children. I suspect
that the
ideologues’ interpretation is often distorted by their lust for power
and control.
However “sincere” the abortionists’ reading of Scripture
might be, innocent
people still die.

You cannot come to the Bible as a scientist observing a physical phenomenon.
You can’t read the Bible and then decide whether or not to believe and
obey
it. You are the instrument for interpreting Scripture, and how you live your
life
determines how accurate and sensitive an instrument you will be. What you say
to
God in the way you live your life determines whether you can hear him speaking
in the Bible. You have to believe it and guide your life by it, have to read
it with a
humble and a contrite heart, or you’ll never know with assurance what it
says—or,
worse, will think it says something to your comfort when it announces your
damnation.

Heaven & Hell

The only way to avoid this is to be formed into the image of Christ, by cooperating
with the work of the Holy Spirit. And this means making, with what light
you have at the moment, the choice God would have you make. “Every time
you
make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that
chooses,
into something a little different from what it was before,” C. S. Lewis
wrote in Mere Christianity .

And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your
life
long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature
or
into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God,
and
with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state
of war and
hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.

To be the first is heaven, he concludes:

To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and
knowledge
and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence,
and
eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state
or
the other.

Part of heaven, notice, is knowledge; part of hell, idiocy. Goodness and knowledge
are all mixed up together. To know the Lord of heaven is to know the truths
he gave in his Scriptures; not to know him is to believe the lies and nonsense
of
hell. As Chesterton said, when men stop believing in God, they don’t
believe in
nothing, they’ll believe in anything—a truth the tragedy and buffoonery
of our
age’s pursuit of answers, from Communist utopias to uninhibited sex to
crystal
pyramids, should make clear to anyone.

“When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the
evil
that is still left in him,” Lewis continued.

When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less.
A
moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks
he
is all right.

This is just common sense, Lewis continues.

You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You
can
see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you
are
making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness
when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both
good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

In other words, if you want to know what is good, become good. If you want
to know what the Bible teaches about morality, you must not only read and
study
it, and not only read and study it within the Church, but you must become
conformed
to the image of its Author.

This will convince us of the truth of the Bible’s moral teaching and
protect us
from the subtle and seductive arguments of its enemies. But what of those
to whom
we speak? How can we convince them when we still don’t know all the answers?
As
we each become more like our Lord, we will find that our witness for biblical
morality will increase. People are rarely convinced by arguments but often
transformed
by love.

We ought not to rest satisfied with our knowledge of biblical morality, nor
with our spotless orthodoxy, nor with our painfully acquired ability to explain
every doctrine and refute every objection. Even the devils believe. Biblical
morality
is not a possession or accomplishment of our own, to be used when needed
and
then put away. It is the life we live in Christ, who came that we might
have life, and
have it more abundantly.

Unhappy Fault:
Leon J. Podles on the Integration of Anger into the Virtuous Life

the 2017 conference

the 2016 conference

Audio

Purchase and download the conference talks

other fsj publications

Anno Domini 2018

The St. James Calendar of the Christian Year—only $14.95

The Daily Devotional Guide

by Patrick Henry Reardon

Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.

The mission of the journal and its publisher, The Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.